Last week, I published an updated roadmap and my vision for the future.
I started Sylius as a set of bundles for Symfony2, but in 2013 the project has evolved into a full e-commerce platform. This year, we took it even further, and extracted PHP components, usable with any framework.
A pet project that turned out to be a technology powering various and complex e-commerce applications worldwide.
It is a great feeling, but Sylius is not even close to what I want it to be in the future. When I look at our progress, it makes me excited about what we can achieve if we keep going!
Open Source is amazing and hard. It is hard because it is not only about coding. With a project of this scale, you need to build a community, define the vision, evangelize at conferences, maintain websites and servers, write documentation (I know, I know) and do hundreds of other things.
Sylius would not be that successful, without the huge help from all the code contributors, translators, issue reporters and my friends from the core team. I am thankful to anyone who has ever participated in one way or another.
It is hard to define the amount of time I have already invested into Sylius. I have never been working on it full-time, but constantly doing about 40 hours per week of commercial work and still being in 1% group of the most active GitHub PHP users.
Of course, open source is very rewarding. It has literally changed my life. I met amazing and smart people, visit awesome places and grew personally and professionally. That is why I want to give back to Sylius and its community even more.
In order to tackle this challenge, I have been looking for a sustainable funding of the project, which would allow me to invest more time and keep Sylius open and free.
Sylius is still in development, but there are applications running in production since 2012 and new projects are started nearly every day.
People and companies have been demanding an official channel of commercial support and this is my answer.
I am pleased to present Lakion, a company, which I co-founded with my friend Michał Marcinkowski.
For over a year now, I have been working exclusively with Sylius based projects, helping the teams to get started by providing Sylius training and advising in terms of architecture and customization.
For more details visit Lakion.com, get in touch via contact form or e-mail us directly to [email protected].
Yes, Sylius is released under a very permissive MIT License and this will never change.
No, the open source power of Sylius comes from its community and it would not make sense.
We are currently looking for passionate and talented PHP developers, who would like to learn Sylius firsthand and use it in real-world projects.
Read more on our website.
Apart from supporting the project, we are committed to building a healthy ecosystem of companies using Sylius for their products or clients.
We want to create opportunities and connect the community with trusted solution providers in order to achieve the best results.
We strongly believe in the idea of “making the pie bigger” and would like to cooperate with all people interested in the future of PHP and e-commerce.
For more details about Early Partner Program, please read our blog post.
If you are already using Sylius for your clients or you would like to start building amazing projects, get in touch.
That’s an exciting adventure and gives me a lot of motivation to continue my work on Sylius. Thank you for your support and expect more exciting news in the coming weeks!
